THE decision had been finally concluded by the members of the South Marchshire Executive Committee that Gabriel Strong, Esq., of The Friary, Saltire, should contest the constituency under Unionist colors at the next election. The government had long been in a ruinous condition, and an appeal to the electorate was imminent, according to the political prophets. Now Rilchester, the premier town in South Marchshire, was one of those intensely patriotic boroughs where political popularity depends largely on the number of guineas squandered by any prospective candidate in the patronage of local charities and local trade. The Rilchester electors were men of sense; they could not stomach a member from whose pockets there came no prophetic clink of gold. John Strong, hard-headed gamester, had contrived to create for himself a certain reputation in the place as a philanthropist and a benevolent patron of sport and pleasure. He had endowed beds at the hospital; he feasted the fisherfolk regularly each summer; he had subscribed with American prodigality to the founding of the working-men’s club. He had even provided the Rilchester rowing club with a racing eight for Moberly regatta. His money had been invested with lavish and consummate care to popularize the name of Strong. The ex-tea merchant already beheld his son a prophetic Pitt, stirring the noble enthusiasm of an empire, carving for himself a sacred niche in the golden fane of history.
Gabriel had been instructed in the subtle art of political fascination. He had attended at flower-shows and all social crushes, smiled and chatted to individuals of every shade and temper, shaken hands with mediocrities on every possible occasion, posed perpetually as an amiable, genial, and cultured young aristocrat. He was quite the Galahad of the Primrose Dames. Artistically attired, with an orchid in his button-hole, he presented himself at all functions of importance, culling possible votes by the magic of a pleasant personality.
The public gayeties that his father had forced upon him had in some measure distracted Gabriel from the melancholy realities of his marriage. With his usual amiable apathy, he acted as ever as the paid vassal of his father; his very household existed as a proof of his dependence on the parental favor. Moreover, there was a certain artificial stimulus in political life that pleased him for a season. He met pretty women who flattered him, mediocre folk who were “proud to make his acquaintance,” big-wigs who were willing to listen to his opinions and to nod approval when some apt phrase promised well for the spirit of debate. He had been something of an orator at Oxford, where his humanism had partaken of a Mazzinian flavor. Expediency, however, had warped his none too tough convictions into the deformed orthodoxy he was supposed to champion. His father’s ambition, also, generous as it was, promised to shed a glamour of ease over the common actualities of life.
Ophelia was still at Callydon suffering her self-love to recuperate after the first frank criticisms of married life. Gabriel had written to Dr. Glibly with regard to his wife’s health, and had received a very sentimental reply indited on scented paper and concluded with a fine flourish of degrees and qualifications. “Mrs. Strong,” wrote the doctor, “was still in that somewhat unstable state so common in women at certain eventful periods of life. She needed perfect rest—perfect rest and complete immunity from all domestic worries for the time being.” Gabriel could have confessed in his heart of hearts that the doctor’s letter was no black and dismal document. John Strong himself had questioned Gabriel as to his wife’s somewhat lengthy absence from home. “It would be well,” he said, “for Ophelia to partner her husband during the coming summer season, and to back him in his social duties, like the handsome and fashionable woman that she was.” Gabriel had spread Dr. Glibly’s letter for his father’s edification, but had offered no explanation as to the causes that had led to Ophelia’s “state of nervous prostration.” Nature could take the blame, and the sentiments woven through the affair were not such as Gabriel cared to trust to the parental conscience.
Despite the light of publicity that was gathering about his person, Gabriel appeared blind to the vast inconsistencies of his life. He drifted as he had ever done in a dream-ship on a sea of dreams. A face shone ever before his eyes, a face wistful as the sky at dawn. Two lives seemed to go forth from him like divergent highways: the one into smoke and turmoil, dust and all weariness; the other into green and brilliant deeps, unutterable shadow-lands of delight, vales of golden rest, hills where the red winds made music. Romance ran beneath his mundane being like a caverned river gorgeous with subterranean fire. There were two worlds within him, two creeds, two gods. He served both, strove to harmonize each, and heard not the peril prophetic upon the lips of fate.
It is difficult for a man whose thoughts are of the purest to comprehend the distorted image his deeds may create in the minds of others. The world is ever ready to suspect evil. Let a man act the Christ and he will assuredly be in danger of being dubbed “devil.” Fleshliness covers the eyes of the multitude with scales of crimson glass, and snow is tinted red by the gaze of the unclean.
Some such innocence of thought rendered Gabriel ingenuously blind to the sinister developments that might arise from his attitude towards the child of the hills. His love for her was as spiritual as moonlight—clear, calm, and infinitely pure. Even the splendid mediæval imagery that gemmed the very thought of her was hallowed to him as with a radiant glow of gold. The wings of angels, brilliant as sun-smitten snow, seemed to breathe and beat above her head. He was honest as the light in his love for her. He would as soon have shamed his homage by any baser feeling as have taken sacramental wine with the lips of a bacchanal.
Letters had passed between the two, and they had met more than once in secret since the March day when they had taken the oath together. A great love is always a pure love. With the multitude, contact engenders disenchantment, possession breeds indifference. Schopenhauer has said that Petrarch’s sonnets would have ceased abruptly if Laura had surrendered herself to his song. Apply the cynicism to the mere sexual instinct and there is truth in the gibe. The greatest love is that which is fated to brave tempests. To such a mind as Gabriel’s the starlike unapproachableness of the girl rendered her the more mysterious and divine. To him love imprisoned behind bars of gold was a rhapsody of exultation and despair.
Joan’s letters were quaint and ingenuous to a degree. She wrote in a bold, round hand, her words being the frank type of her thoughts—thoughts that shimmered with an intense perception of the splendor of nature. She approached life in her free and elemental fashion. Facts had no pedantic and foreordained significance for her. She had the air of an angel treading an unknown earth and marvelling at the inconsistencies thereof. Nor had she any knowledge of the doctrine of original sin.
“I am a mere child,” she wrote, “but it seems to me as though a man and a woman might make the earth a great garden, radiant with goodness as with flowers. This Bible that you gave me has been much with me of late. I had never read the book before. I cannot see why sin should enter into life. To me it seems inexplicable, an anomalous creation. What can sin give to men that it has such hold over them? To be true to truth seems to me as natural as to breathe or to sleep.”
And again:
“If we could all remain mere children! Youth is the key of joy. Age often seems to cover it with rust so that it can no longer unlock the treasures of life. You say that it is impossible to retain the innocence of childhood because of the utter hideousness of one’s elders. The ‘little ones’ are doomed to be ‘offended’ by experience. Why, then, should we not be bold enough to disregard those whom we despise?”
And again:
“I think I could die for an ideal. Whether we are immortal or no, I cannot see why a good man should fear death. If immortality proves real, then he is assured of heaven. If death be the end, then he but falls into an eternal sleep and is none the wiser. I could say to my soul, ‘I have lived my best, now let me sleep.’ The notion of doing one’s duty in order to bribe God does not please me.”
Gabriel was perhaps more personal in his statements. He found the girl’s heart a pure spring into which he might pour his thoughts, where they glistened like gems in a crystal setting.
“You are my great proof of immortality,” he wrote. “I cannot believe that such a soul as yours can end in dust. It would be blasphemy against the divine instinct. Your spirit can never die.”
Also:
“You have become a religion to me. In your eyes I see God and the heavens opened. Tell me, is there sin in such a creed?”
And again:
“You are like a great light in my heart; may your glory never cease from my soul. Through you I am transfigured; in your voice Eternity speaks to me.”
Joan carried Gabriel’s letters in her bosom in a case of green silk. They lay warm and still against her heart. She read them often, for they were like the words of a new world to her, eloquent and lovely.
THE old castle of Domremy stood in a green valley running northward from the Mallan, a gray and solemn ruin bosomed in the tranquil shadows of the woods. Set in a broad moat as in a shield of silver, its black battlements rose black with their machiolated shadows against the blue background of sky. The clouds cast their shadows over the ruin like ghost memories of the past. There was a wild melancholy about the place, an infinite wistfulness that touched the heart. Romance seemed to tread the ruined walls, her sable hair sweeping in the wind, her wild voice weaving enchantments through the listening woods.
Gabriel had loved Domremy since the first June evening when its gray towers had dreamed to him from their green repose. In later years it had often solaced him with its plaintive loveliness, its eyrie whisperings of the past. Its grandeur had served as a bulwark against the prosaic sterility of modern minds. Like the dark and mysterious prophecy of some ancient alchemist, it put forth reality from the heart and throned the infinite in its stead.
Gabriel had spoken to Joan of the place in his letters. She knew Domremy well, had dreamed there even as he had done, and looked down upon the white lilies mimicking the face of the moon. The pair had plotted a tryst there, had met one April day on a path that ran from the hills, and wandered through the woods to the gray towers brooding over the water. They had climbed one of the turrets together, leaned upon the battlements, and turned back like children into the past.
The sky was dappled with innumerable isles of snow. The meadows were wondrous green under the blue heavens; the gnarled and naked trees glistened in the sun. Joan, her hat laid upon the parapet, stood like a damsel of old, her hair flashing gold in the eyes of romance. Gabriel leaned against the battlements two paces away, watching the woods and water and the face of the girl at his side.
“You are content?” he asked her.
She turned her eyes to his and smiled.
“Ask your own heart,” was her response.
Gabriel covered his eyes with his hand.
“How the past rises up to inspire me,” he said. “I could dream here day by day like a mystic, and know no sin. If we could stride back five centuries and take life like a crystal globe untarnished in our hands! Armor should flash in yonder woods; trumpets cry upon these towers. Ever should your face look out upon these meadows, like the face of evening out of a cloudless sky. As for me, I should be young again, and a man.”
She looked at him out of her trustful eyes of gray, while her face seemed full of a calm glory of honor. There was no shadow as yet over her soul.
“Would you begin life anew?”
The man’s hands gripped the stone.
“Would to God it could be so!” he said. “I have sold my soul’s birthright for red pottage, for unlovely ease, and cowardly sloth. Life is a battle-field, not a garden; I have been awakened to the truth too late.”
Joan pondered his words for a moment.
“Is it not possible to begin life anew?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We are so hedged by the ethics of the world that no escape is open. Fashion, vanity, prejudice, and greed—these are our task-masters. Life is like a path spiked on either side with thorns. We toil on in the dust while beyond us gleam the gardens of the blessed, unapproachable and lovely.”
“Who, then, are the blessed?”
“The blessed are those who have fought their fight like giants and have conquered. There are they who have scorned the laws of expediency and error. There are they who have lived true to their own souls. There are they who have not fallen to the flesh. Liberty is the guerdon, joy, and the light of truth.”
“And yet you are not among them.”
“I—indeed!”
There was a fine self-scorn in his voice that was almost dramatic.
“No,” he said; “I cannot flatter myself with any degree of heroism; it is only great souls who die for an ideal. The noblest life that was ever lived on earth had to end in a martyrdom that it might strike home to the hearts of men. I have been nothing but a martyr to my own egotism. Having once struck my colors to that black pirate Expediency on the high seas of life, I suppose I must be content to feel my soul in shackles.”
Joan was pulling at the moss upon the stones with her long, white fingers. Her eyes were on the distant woods; they were dark as with thought, and wondrously pathetic.
“A new sun seemed to swim into the sky,” she said, “when I read of the martyrdom on Calvary. That was a great life.”
“A life that changed history,” he answered her. “There have been many theorists, but none save Christ who proved his philosophy perfect in his own person.”
Joan was silent again for a while. The shadows of thought had deepened in her eyes till they looked like two pools of gloom.
“I have been thinking of that parable,” she said.
“Which parable?” he asked her.
“That which tells of the pearl of great price—where the man sold all that he had in order to possess it.”
“Yes.”
“There is profound truth to me in the words. Cannot a man take his inspiration from such a parable—sell all, dare all, to gain that single pearl. Is the present so pleasant to him that he is afraid to fling himself giant-like against custom.”
Gabriel looked at her as a man might look at one who prophesies. There was a sudden kindling of courage upon his face, but again a cloud soon covered it.
“No,” he said, slowly, “such a thing cannot be.”
“Tell me why.”
“Because the world is too strong for us; because it is impious to risk a woman’s honor; because the bonds of society are too rigid.”
“And who forged these bonds of society?”
“Man.”
“Then cannot man break them also?”
“It demands too great a sacrifice of others; it outrages too grossly the hereditary instincts of the race.”
“Cannot a man free himself then from false ties?”
“Not always.”
“Because—”
“They are often of his own forging.”
“Yet he can break them.”
“And his word also?”
“Is it not better to break one’s word than to make life one long lie?”
“It would be a sin against society.”
“Perhaps you are right,” she said; “but I would rather be an outcast than a hypocrite.”
Simple and reflective as her words were, they stung the man like the thongs of a scourge.
“Joan!”
His voice startled her; she turned and looked in his face, read pain there and a tumult of thought.
“What have I said?” she asked him.
“You despise me!”
“Gabriel!”
She understood him with a sudden flash of sympathy.
“Ah! forgive me.”
Her fingers touched his and closed upon them with a quick, appealing pressure. Her face was turned to his with the rich innocence of truth.
“No,” he said, breathing fast; “do not touch me. Ah, God, do you not understand?”
She withdrew her hand, and her face grew pale again, her eyes shadowy even as with tears.
“Forgive me,” she said, slowly, as though speaking to her own soul. “I had hurt your heart and—”
“It is nothing,” he said to her.
“It is everything—to me,” she answered, sadly.
“Before God—remember that I honor you.”
She looked up at him suddenly with a great light in her eyes.
“Gabriel, I will not hurt your heart again. You are a good man, and may God bless you! I will remember our vow.”
Tragedy was moving upon the twain with ghastly step, her face muffled in her sable robe. They had created in their dreams a radiant Eden for their souls to wander in, yet the ancient dragon had squirmed in amid the leaves. Nothing is sacred in this world to the sordid sarcasms of the fool and the libertine. And the fatal chance that first parted the boughs and suffered the world to peer in upon their paradise was mean and prosaic enough in all truth.
That identical afternoon Mrs. Marjoy had driven a friend over, who was staying with her, to visit Domremy. They had left their phaeton at a cottage in the valley and had walked through the woods to the castle. The causeway crossed the moat from the north, and Mrs. Marjoy and her companion, an Australian lady, reached the place unseen by Gabriel and Joan, who were on one of the southern turrets. Thus it befell that at the very moment Mrs. Marjoy and her guest were standing in the ruins of the chapel the man and the girl passed out from the black yawn of the southern gate and crossed the central court towards the northern entry.
Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacled vision had doomed Gabriel to recognition. Herself unseen, that magnanimous lady watched the pair cross the court and disappear beneath the rotting portcullis of the northern gate. There was an intense and malicious satisfaction on Mrs. Marjoy’s red face. She displayed her teeth in a thin, cracked laugh, and gestured to her companion with her black umbrella.
“Did you see those two?” she said.
The Australian lady stared.
“That worthy, my dear Mrs. Grace, is supposed to be our future member of Parliament. A horribly profligate creature.”
“Indeed!” said the colonial lady, with some austerity.
“I knew we should catch him before long,” continued the doctor’s wife, beaming with the thought of enjoying another woman’s shame. “His wife is staying away. Poor Mrs. Strong, if she could only see her husband gadding about with one of his women from London. I always knew he was a dissolute person. Did you ever see such a depraved, loose, dowdy-looking creature as that girl?”
Mrs. Grace, a kindly woman, displayed some measure of surprise. Saltire society was fresh to her, and she was ignorant of the fact that Mrs. Marjoy considered herself a recording angel, by whose dictates man should stand or fall. Nor was Mrs. Grace in the habit of clutching at such violent conclusions, being herself a mother and a magnanimous woman of the world.
“As a matter of fact,” she remarked, “I thought that girl looked particularly sweet and pretty.”
Mrs. Marjoy glared and rattled the ribs of her umbrella. She always considered a difference of opinion as a personal affront. Only that morning she had declared to Dr. Marjoy that Mrs. Grace was a woman without strict convictions as to propriety, one of those flabby persons who never saw the glaring moral inconsistencies of others.
“I have suspected that man for a long while,” she now observed, with her usual sublime and eczematous hauteur. “Believe me, he is a most dissolute person.”
“Do you always base your conclusions on such slender evidence?” asked the lady from the antipodes.
“I never condemn others wantonly,” said the doctors wife. “I am a Christian.”
“And yet you say that a man is a rogue because you happen to see him walking alone with a woman whom you do not know.”
There was a scintillant and vindictive gleam in Mrs. Marjoy’s brown eyes. She pressed her lips into a tight line and prodded the turf with the point of her umbrella.
“I generally find that my inferences are correct,” she said.
“Indeed! I am glad to say we are more generous and healthy in the colonies.”
ADEEP and wonderful tone of tenderness had sounded in Joan Gildersedge’s heart since that brief passion-play amid the ruins of Domremy. It was an easier hand that had trimmed the lamp and scattered violet-dust over the snow-white altar. There was something more rich and maternal in her mood towards the man, something more passionate also, more red of heart. There was more mystery, more strangeness in her love than before. It was no longer an individual sentiment, a single vision of truth and beauty, a white statue scatheless in the sun. There was something sacrificial about it, a promise of universality that uttered the first exultant cry of martyrdom. She began to think more of the man’s soul than her own, to imagine his moods, to forecast his presentiments. Sympathy was the golden woof; the instinct of love, the subtle shuttle.
Gabriel Strong felt the change in the girl when he kept the promise he had made to her at Domremy, and came to see her at Burnt House, even in her own home. The contrasts in his existence smote him forcibly on the occasion. He had spent the previous day at Rilchester in political inanities, had attended a philanthropic meeting, and listened to platitudes falling like perpetual sand upon the brain. The sterility of the part he played had dawned upon him with amazing forcefulness. He had confessed to himself, as he had driven home at night, the unctuous hypocrisy of it all, the infirm purpose rusty as an old man’s love. The contrast touched him to the soul when he approached Burnt House the following afternoon, alone and on foot. The place seemed like a green and glorious refuge to him, where he could breathe in the essence of heaven and renew life as at some holy well.
The girl’s transfiguration reacted vividly upon his sensitive thought. She seemed to have grown taller, more stately, more serious. There was a species of infinite forethought in her manner towards him, a tender earnestness that made her gray eyes luminous and wonderful. It was a child’s countenance no longer, for the divine element had entered into her soul.
She took him with her onto the moors that noontide, where the hills stood purple against the sky and valleys were steeped in a glamour of mist. Walking close at his elbow, but looking seldom in his face, she spoke little, seeming intent rather on making her sympathy a refuge for the man’s tired thoughts. She was infinitely restful and tender, calm as moonlight upon still water. To Gabriel that afternoon she appeared as a twin sister to his own beloved Judith, save that she was crowned with a divine mystery such as a sister could never claim.
“You are tired,” she had said, as they crossed the moors and met a soft wind from the sea.
“Why do you think that?” he asked her, with a kind of quiet pain in his voice.
“I can see it in your eyes. Are not all your moods intelligible to me?”
“You are right,” he answered, with his melancholy smile; “the trivialities of life are beginning to weigh upon me. I would give much gold to be young again, and free.”
“Are you so old?”
“As old as a youth who has been bred in a dungeon, whose best years have been tombed in stone.”
“Perhaps you think too much,” she said.
“Perhaps! Who can help thinking when one has made mistakes. I hope to think some day for the benefit of others.”
“You would warn them?”
“Yes,” he said, with a sad simplicity; “that is the best use to which we can put our errors. But I am weary of psychology for the moment. Let us forget problems and be children.”
She looked over the world with half-closed lids, the sun beating upon her face.
“As you will,” she said, quietly; “and yet I think a time comes when it is impossible to be a child again, when the mind ceases to ebb and flow, but moves like a river perpetually towards the sea. The intense realism of life burns upon the brain and reduces the flimsier interests to ashes. Only the iron is left, and that is at white heat.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked.
“It is what life seems to be teaching me.”
“Yes,” he said, with a sudden, strange solemnity; “never more shall we be children on earth, for the heart of the child is tombed in the ice of knowledge. It is all plain to me now. Life is a grim thing to those who are only half strong. I have often thought of late that there is nothing left me worth living for.”
“Do you mean it?” she asked, almost hastily.
“No,” he said, looking in her eyes and reading his soul’s image in them; “I spoke only of the life that is; you are part of the ideal.”
There was a sudden, strange intensity of feeling upon her face. Her eyes were wide and appealing. She drew her breath in deeply like one who sings.
“Gabriel,” she said.
He glanced at her, and the color on his bronzed face deepened. His silence told her that he waited.
“I want to live; I want to be real to you, flesh and blood, a woman, not a mere spirit.”
“Joan!”
“Can I not be real to you?”
“You are the most splendid and ideal reality Heaven has ever vouchsafed to me.”
“Ah! not as I could wish,” she said. “We seem all intellect at times, you and I. Yet—if I say more I shall hurt you. Ah! God knows, I want to be a help to you.”
“Before God, you help me,” he said, drawing in a deep breath.
Beyond the moors the hills were streaks of blue in a golden atmosphere. The air was sultry, preternaturally clear, eloquent of stormy weather. Everywhere the gorse was tonguing into flame. The meadows were rimmed with gold as the two passed back towards the dark knolls of the yews and cypresses. There was a certain sadness over them both, a prophecy of evil that seemed to hover over their hearts like clouds over silent mountain tarns.
Joan stood in the gravel drive and swung her hat by the strings. She did not look at the man as she spoke.
“My father is in the garden,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Will you see him?”
“If you wish it,” he said, quickly.
“Wait. I will go to him first; he may be asleep.”
She disappeared amid the dark whorls of the cypress boughs like a white figure of truth. Gabriel leaned against the trellis and covered his face with his hand. Sudden foreboding, a sense of imminent woe, gathered about his soul like a heavy cloud massing overhead. A fatalistic spirit seemed to seize on him out of the unknown. Had he then driven the childhood out of this girl’s life and made her wise to her own distress. He was conscious suddenly of the supreme egotism that had grown up flesh of his flesh, spirit of his spirit. His face was white and strained when Joan reappeared from amid the trees.
“He is not there,” she said.
She marked the look on the man’s face—the gray, tired stare of one in pain.
“Gabriel, what ails you?”
Her eyes were very bright and eager, and there was a kind of half-fear on her face.
“Nothing,” he said. “I am only a little faint.”
She opened the heavy oak door, beckoned him across the hall, and led him into a large, shadowy room, lighted by three mullioned windows towards the west. Wainscoting covered the walls. The floor was of parqueterie carpeted with several old rugs. Antique china, interspersed with bowls of anemones, red and blue, filled the carved mantel-shelf. The grate was black and cumbersome, the hearth inlaid with tiles of a dark-green color. In the centre of the room a round mahogany table bore a great blue bowl ablaze with marsh marigolds. Heavy damask red curtains were half drawn across the window recesses. Joan flung one back, opened a casement frame, pointed Gabriel to the cushioned window-seat.
“Rest there, dear; I must go and find my father.”
The man leaned back against the panelling with a saddened sense of peace. The antique yet fragrant flavor of the room floated upon him, redolent of the past. There was infinite magic in the girl’s gentle masterfulness, and her words had set his heart hurrying. If this old house was only his own home, and Joan his wife, golden emblem of womanhood moving like sunlight in dark places! He played with the phantasm as a poet dallies with a splendid dream.
When Joan came back to him she came like the damsel of vision, gracious and adorable. She had loosed her hair upon her shoulders; there were red wind-flowers in the bosom of her creamy blouse; a belt of silver-work topped the smooth sweep of her olive-green skirt. Yet there was a tired look upon her face, as though she were keeping something hid within her heart. She sat down on a little tapestry-covered sofa, with her face towards the window.
“My father is asleep,” she said, with a pensive stare. “He is growing very weak and feeble. I have another woman to help me. I think she was hewn out of granite. Are you better now?”
“Yes,” he said, leaning back against the wainscoting and watching her face with a melancholy pride. “It is very restful here; I breathe the air that moves about you, and am at peace. You, too, look tired.”
Her face clouded suddenly, and there was a pathetic regret upon her lips that would have been piteous had not her gray eyes shone so bravely.
“It is my father,” she said. “I do not mind your knowing; it is a kind of nightmare to me. I do all that I can for him, and that seems little.”
“He is ill?”
“He is killing himself day by day.”
For the moment Gabriel found nothing to say to her, for fate shackled him. He would have given much to have been able to throw his manhood at the girl’s feet like an honest sword. But that same sword was rusted to its hypocritic sheath. He could but protest with his lips, pay verbal homage.
“This must be a heavy burden for you,” he said, presently.
“It is my duty.”
“You do not complain.”
“That were graceless,” she said, “and yet I do not know what I should do if I had not the thought of you ever with me.”
Their solitude was broken by the woman, Mrs. Primmer. Her face was hard and calculating. There was a certain critical vigilance in her eyes that made Gabriel restless. He felt that the woman was watching him almost like a spy, and that her verdict in no wise flattered the spirituality of his mission. Mrs. Primmer’s morality had been baked in a mould of clay. Charity had escaped in the process. Greed and self-satisfaction were lined and graven about her mouth.
Mrs. Primmer’s fingers lingered long over the table. She had a discordant habit of clattering and fidgeting with the china. She stole side glances the while at the man seated in the window recess.
“Has that woman been long with you?” Gabriel asked, when the door had closed again.
“A few months.”
“I suppose she is intensely respectable?”
“She is preferable to the other,” said Joan, with a sigh. “I wonder if there are many such women in the world?”
“As Mrs. Primmer?”
“Yes.”
“Thousands, unfortunately.”
“I think a woman with a soul of ice is the most terrible thing earth can show.”
“Malice incarnate, sharp of beak and red of claw.”
“Do most people always seem bent on thinking the worst they can of their fellows?”
“It is partly the result of sectarianism.”
“What do you mean by sectarianism?”
“The exclusive and narrow religious spirit of fools—the spirit that prompts a man to say, ‘You do not believe what I believe, therefore you are damned.’ ”
“Are there, then, such absurd persons in the world?”
“Hundreds, mostly Christian.”
“Christian!”
“By profession.”
“But not in spirit.”
“Hardly.”
The sky had grown more overcast and a certain heavy torpor in the air gave promise of thunder. Masses of purple clouds stood piled in the west, cratered with burning pits of fire. A vast vault of ebony was rising towards the sun. Now and again a sudden gusty wind came breathing about the house, making the trees shudder as though they feared a storm.
“How black the sky grows,” said the girl, joining Gabriel in the window-seat.
“A storm threatens.”
“And the wind prophesies.”
Into the room a transient stream of sunlight poured. It burned in the girl’s hair and upon the flowers in her bosom, seeming to enhance the grim promise of the sky.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“Foul weather is nothing to me.”
“You must stay here till the storm has passed.”
“Perhaps,” said the man, looking at the clouds.
The west grew lurid. A tense silence weighed upon the world, a silence so solemn that the very trees might have stood watching for some miraculous portent in the sky. The laurels and the grass shone with a vivid green in the mysterious light. The purple clouds in the west had taken fire and were fringed with flame.
The wind rose. They heard it crying far away upon the hills, deep, hoarse, and distant. It gathered clamorous in the air, a great, solemn moan that seemed to surge from the east like the cavern cry of the dead. The trees stooped, swayed, tossed as in torture. Rain followed with the rattle of a cataract, a heavy mist shot through with the fiery spears of the setting sun. Lightning gleamed on the hills. The sky grew great with thunder. In the onrush of twilight the trees struggled in a tornado of wind and rain, while the house seemed to quake with the uproar of the storm.
The two in the window-seat had drawn closer as they watched the sky. There was a long silence between them. Once Joan’s hand touched Gabriel’s. They drew apart suddenly with a quick glance into each other’s eyes.
“I love such a storm,” said the girl.
“It is grand. I have often thought that I should like to end my life at such an hour as this.”
“More so than in a golden twilight?”
“It is mere superstition on my part,” he added. “Yet I have had a kind of presentiment that life will end for me in tragedy.”
“Why do you think that?” she asked, with a sudden glance into his eyes.
“Because the death is often an echo of the life, a storm-cry or a peaceful noise of flutes.”
The dusk had deepened rapidly; the rain still rushed upon the earth. The lightning had grown fitful in the west with a sullen roar of distant thunder. The wind had passed and was gone, as though some grim company of the damned had swept gibbering athwart the sky. There was no sound now save the rattle of the rain upon the laurels.
The dusk thickened to an eerie gloom. In the window-seat the man and the girl crouched like two silent children. Joan’s face was white as death in the dark; her eyes shone with a peculiar brilliancy; now and again there was a faint glimmer of light upon her hair.
“You cannot go yet,” she said.
“The sky may clear soon.”
There was the sound of a door opening stealthily. Gabriel, glancing over his shoulder, saw a white cap and a gray face peering through the dusk. Then there came a mumbled excuse and the door closed again. Mrs. Primmer had seen the two outlined together against the window. They were too perilously near, and in the dark also, to satisfy the lady’s conscience. She had drawn back with a hard smile and sundry feminine cogitations in her heart.
“The woman moves like a cat,” said Joan, leaning her head against the panelling.
“Mrs. Primmer?”
“Yes.”
He was silent a moment with a dark race of thought through his mind. The girl seemed absolutely unconscious of all evil, trustful as a child.
“I must go now,” he said.
“In this rain?”
“Yes. The sky is clearing. I will go to the door and look out.”
He spoke in a monotonous tone that hurt the girl’s heart for the moment; she did not realize the moral force of those few words. They passed through the darkened hall together and stood in the porch. The steady rattle of the shower was ceasing; it lessened minute by minute; soon there was nothing but the fall of the rain from the trees. A delicious fragrance breathed in the night air.
“I will take my chance,” said the man.
Joan stepped out with him into the drive.
“As far as the gate,” she said, half appealingly.
They passed down the drive into the dense umbrage of the yews and cypresses. Overhead a silvery film of clouds covered the sky; here and there a star flickered through. The west was still black as the mouth of a mighty cavern.
At the gate they stood a moment as though loath to part. The girl’s eyes looked very big and luminous in the dusk; her hair was a dark wreath about her face.
She gave him one of the red wind-flowers from her bosom.
“Good-night,” she said.
Her voice was very wistful, and she stood close to the man as he held the iron gate open with one hand.
“I shall see you again soon?” she asked.
A sudden hunger for her lips seized him, but he withheld the desire and drew back slowly from under the overhanging trees.
“Good-night,” he said to her.
“Good-night.”
She watched him turn and disappear into the darkness. Loneliness seemed to flood like black water into her heart. Her face was white and sorrowful as she passed back under the cloud-strewn sky.
AT Callydon the colors of life were being contrasted in bolder fashion and with more riotous effect. Vermilion was the prevailing dye. The sentimentalities had verged somewhat on heavy melodrama, and a suggestive voluptuousness in the staging had prolonged the play.
Two people mutually enamoured of an identical future are not long in coming to some understanding of each other’s hearts, particularly if the hearts in question possess more of the human element than the divine.
James Maltravers had succumbed seriously to interests that he had been almost brought to regard as the mere foibles of frivolity. And since his honor was a somewhat opalescent thing, blue and sincere one moment, red the next when caught in certain rays of the sun, it may be imagined that his conscience was nimble in the justification of his cause. The dramaticisms of life are in the higher sense wholly a matter of character. There is nothing so impressive as the grand temptation of a fine spirit; nothing more mean and contemptible than the facile sinning of a corrupt one. Incidents are what our souls make them, the song of the swan or the death-slime of the snail.
It had pleased Ophelia Strong to represent herself as a woman oppressed beneath a grievous and unkindly past. It had pleased her to pose picturesquely at her husband’s expense, to reverse the primitive fable, and accuse the marital Adam of leading evil into Eden. The assumption was easily upheld by ingenuity, much fanciful detail, and an intelligent disregard of truth. Having assumed an air of martyrdom, it was easy for her to procure artistic matter to color the romance.
As for the soldier, he was a man, and a sentimentalist in a somewhat florid school of realism. It was easy to discover chivalry in the affair—even to suffer chivalry to flame up into a more serious emotion. The woman stood in need of sympathy, made abundant pretence of desolation, posed very charmingly in the part like the interesting woman that she was. Maltravers soon discovered that sympathy was a very pleasant commodity for barter. It cost nothing, supplied infinite recreation, enhanced the charms of billiards and the like. He was quite prepared to echo Ophelia’s humor. Let her but pipe to him and he would dance.
It is sufficient for the needs of the narrative to record certain remarks that passed on one occasion between Ophelia Strong and her most Platonic confidant. Golf was the excuse, a foursome on the Callydon links, in which Miss Mable Saker and a male friend formed the opposition. Sundry disjointed sentences were possible as the game proceeded. The physical distractions present were useful in deducting from the gravity of the dialogue and shedding an air of flippant satiricism over the incidents.
“How is your bibliomaniac?” said the soldier, as the two were following on after a drive.
“Fairly frigid,” came the response.
“Has his magnificence favored you with a letter of late?”
“Not for ten days. You see, he is so much in demand as a genius.”
“Geniuses are dangerous folk—tar-barrels, dynamite. They need damping.”
They passed about the hem of a larch-wood where a thousand emerald points were shimmering in the sun. The gorse was ablaze on either side of the track. Down in the valley beneath them a lake flickered under the heavens, and they could catch the faint roar of the water as it foamed over the weir.
“I suppose your friends know all about it?” said the major, pulling the peak of his cap down to shade his eyes in the sun.
Ophelia glanced at his clean-shaven, jockey-like profile with critical approval.
“Not much.”
“Oh, but they ought to.”
Two small boys trespassed on the line of fire.
“Fore! you brats.”
The soldier’s voice rang clear and clarion-like. It seemed to come from his chest with a brisk and healthful forcefulness, a strenuous virility that was unproblematic and easeful.
“My dear girl, you are much too amiable,” he said, as they waded through a lagoon of heather.
“Am I?”
“You women are so patient; you will stand hell and damnation for the man you are fond of.”
Ophelia smiled.
“And you think I am still fond of him?” she said.
“Don’t ask me to be a prophet.”
“I am not a Mary or a Prudence.”
“Not so puritanically fatuous.”
“Hardly.”
“Matters often sift themselves,” he said; “gentlemen of that class usually unbuckle the strap with their own fingers sooner or later. All the better for society, you know. Indiscretions brought to light, judicial interference, a decree nisi, etc. Oh yes, these things can be managed.”
MRS. MINCE was in possession of her husband’s study, a melancholy room whose single window looked forth upon a red-brick wall and a corner of Mr. Mince’s vegetable garden. The room was carpeted with red drugget and curtained with dingy green plush. A forcible aroma of stale tobacco-smoke pervaded the air. Ranged along one wall were a number of dilapidated leather chairs like needy pensioners, the seats of the uninitiated who came on certain occasions to receive wisdom from Mr. Mince’s lips. A deal bookcase stood with warped shelves beneath a ponderous infliction of theological literature. The very books appeared dreary monuments of a dogmatism that had outlived its age. As for the room, it seemed to smell of Calvin and to echo the barbaric incongruities of the Athanasian Creed. It suggested a geological museum in its atmosphere, save that geology stands in peril of being dubbed heretical, and Mr. Mince’s sacerdotal fossils were orthodox to the last letter.
Mrs. Mince was in possession of her husband’s desk-chair, that solemn pedestal whence the sage gave to Saltire those luminous moments of spiritual exaltation begot of brandy and tobacco. Opposite the vicaress, on one of the sedilia bankrupt of horse-hair, sat that estimable person Mrs. Primmer, who had dwelt as cook for seven years under the parsonic roof and had earned a reputation for sober saintliness and extreme economy. Mrs. Primmer was garbed in her best for the occasion, a lavish outlay of crape and jet beads testifying to the woe that had once made of her a widow. She was one of Mrs. Mince’s “props of honesty,” an estimable errant angel in cloth boots and crape.
The reason of Mrs. Primmer’s expedition that day was a certain matter that lay heavy on what she was pleased to call her conscience. Hers was a pilgrimage undertaken from honest motives, a most disinterested excursion. The vicaress and the ex-cook were keenly in sympathy on such a subject. With admirable ingenuity they veiled their too feminine propensities under the cassocks of duty and moral obligation.
“I think you were quite right, Eliza,” Mrs. Mince was saying, “to come to me in this matter. It most certainly needs careful consideration, and you have acted like a conscientious Christian woman. You are quite sure—now—as to the gentleman’s identity?”
“Certain,” replied the conscientious person, with a tense closure of the lips; “I have one of his handkerchiefs here, ma’am, marked with his name.”
“Dear, dear,” said the vicaress, “how very scandalous! They are always out together, you say? Dear, dear. I suppose all the offence is on his side, Mrs. Primmer?”
The ex-cook folded her bony hands over her black skirt and spoke with regretful candor.
“I’m afraid not, ma’am. The girl’s every bit as bad as the man.”
“Dear, dear,” said Mrs. Mince again, “how very scandalous, to be sure! only married eight months, and his wife away on a holiday. And you caught them in the dark, you say?”
“In the dark, ma’am, during that terrible storm on Wednesday night.”
“In the dark, yes.”
Mrs. Mince’s face was suffused with a shiny avidity; even her colorless eyes were eager.
“Well, ma’am, I shouldn’t like to say all I thought I saw.”
“Of course not, Eliza; it is too shocking a subject for clean-minded women to discuss. Dear, dear, how badly people turn out in this world; human nature has nothing but disappointments for us. Only to think of it,” and Mrs. Mince sighed.
“I thought I ought to come and ask your advice, ma’am,” said Mrs. Primmer, with great deference.
“It shows a most excellent spirit in you, Eliza.”
“The responsibility, ma’am, rather troubled me; I thought I would come to a good, godly lady for counsel. Old Mr. Gildersedge is weak and helpless, what with the drink and the like, poor old gentleman. He ain’t to be considered ‘compot mentis,’ as they call it, ma’am. I couldn’t see all this going on and say nothing to nobody.”
Mrs. Mince wiped her face with her handkerchief and seemed agreeably conscious of her own importance.
“You were quite right, Eliza,” she said; “this is a most painful discovery. I must talk it over with Mr. Mince and see what his Christian conscience suggests. For the present, I should keep the whole affair a profound secret. Silence is golden, Eliza, on occasions.”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
Mrs. Mince seemed to gather her soul for a final flight of charitable circumspection.
“You must go back,” she said, unctuously, “watch, and say nothing. Try to be the poor, deluded girl’s guardian angel in secret. It is sad—most sad. I only hope something may be done before it is too late; as the wife of one of the Father’s ministers I will think it over, and pray to the dear God for guidance. Now you must really go into the kitchen, Eliza, and get some tea.”
Mrs. Primmer’s stony face seemed to lighten seraphically at the suggestion.
“I’ve only done, ma’am,” she said, “what the dear Lord put into my heart to do. I thank Him every day of my life that he gave me seven years of sojourn under this good, saintly roof. Mr. Mince’s sermons, ma’am, always taught me to love the Holy Book and to look to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. ‘God is love.’ I have that text you gave me over my bed, ma’am.”
“Ah, Eliza, we always try to do our best,” said Mrs. Mince, with an inimitable smirk in the direction of the vegetable garden.
When Mrs. Primmer had betaken herself to the scene of her past culinary prowess, Mrs. Mince panted up-stairs to her bedroom and proceeded to array herself in Sabbath attire. She donned her new bonnet with the red roses in it and her black silk dress. She buttoned on a new pair of glacé kid boots and hung her little gold cross on her bosom. Mrs. Mince’s toilet would have suggested a smart tea-party, a church service, or some important parochial function. Being in some vague way impressed by the onerous responsibility of her British matronship, she had donned full pontificals for the occasion. A state gossip, a most solemn scandal festival, was in the air, and with quaint feminine naïveté the vicaress had flown to her finery as though her attire should be in harmony with the splendor of her tidings.
Mrs. Mince threaded the archaic and picturesque Saltire High Street with a species of complacent waddle that characterized her mind. The glimpses of forestland and azure sky caught betwixt red roofs and bourgeoning orchards were foreign to her ken. She was a person who delighted in oil and vinegar. If you had shown her some masterpiece of art in the nude, she would have sniffed and remarked, “How very disgusting!” She possessed the mock modesty of coarse-minded persons—a mock modesty that waxes loud and aggressive to hide the nastiness beneath.
Mrs. Marjoy was at home, or in her lair, as certain uncharitable folk had expressed it. The doctor’s wife was in a particularly angelic mood. Mrs. Mince found Mrs. Marjoy closeted with the eldest Miss Snodley in her drawing-room. The mercurial lady was creaking to and fro in a patent-spring rocking-chair that needed oiling. She dribbled some lukewarm water into the exhausted teapot and greeted the vicaress with dubious delight.
Mrs. Mince had seated herself with a species of portentous calm. She looked supremely cheerful, big and beaming with the fat confessions stowed in her motherly bosom. Tidings of honey, vineyards, and much corn! The lady gloated like an Israelite over the promised spoiling of Canaan.
“Dear, dear, such news,” she said, fingering her fat wedding-ring, as though meditating upon the supreme respectability of her own lot.
The two listeners were “muzzles up” on the instant, like hounds that give tongue over a struck scent.
“What is it?”
“That Ginge girl’s engaged at last!”
“Nonsense.”
“That hussy!”
“Guess again, my dear.”
“Your cook’s gone wrong?” said Mrs. Marjoy, who had a particular grievance against domestics.
“No.”
“Some one has eloped?” ventured Miss Snodley.
“No, dear, much more exciting.”
“Tell us, then.”
Mrs. Mince took a deep breath and delivered herself of her tidings with fitting éclat.
“Young Strong has compromised himself?” she said.
There was a moment’s silence, then a kind of cackling outburst, like the pother in a farm-yard over the laying of an egg.
“Never,” said Miss Snodley.
“He has.”
“When—how?”
“I knew it,” quoth Mrs. Marjoy, with intense pride. “I always knew that fellow was a scoundrel.”
“And Ophelia?” said Miss Snodley.
The three ladies looked at one another and tittered.
“It will take the airs out of her,” said Mrs. Mince.
“Serve her right,” quoth the doctor’s wife.
“Those Gussets were always so stuck up,” said Miss Snodley.
Then they all stared at one another again, embraced rapturously in the spirit, and indulged in more tittering.
“Tell us all about it,” said Mrs. Marjoy, reserving her own Domremy episode as a finale.
They drew their chairs closer together, like Macbeth’s witches over their reeking caldron. Mrs. Mince related Mrs. Primmer’s experiences, with certain embellishments of her own, doing abundant justice, as was to be expected, to the sinister aspects of the romance. When she had talked her fill, Mrs. Marjoy capped the tale with her own conclusions drawn from the Domremy incident. Indeed, the three ladies enjoyed themselves with much thoroughness that afternoon. No such sport had fallen to their barbs since a local farmer had been accused of starving his pigs, a very minor excitement. Christians they were in name, yet the spirit of imperial Rome still lingered in their bosoms. To have witnessed a combat between wild beasts and slaves was a display beyond the possibilities of the civilized arena. Indeed, the very mention of it would doubtless have inspired them with unctuous horror and strident indignation. Yet there was little difference in the main betwixt the tiger-hearted dames of Rome and these modern ladies, save that the latter were hypocrites, the former honest even in their depravity. The pagans gloated over agonies in the flesh, the Christians over agonies in the spirit.
“What a scandal,” said the vicaress, with ill-concealed satisfaction, “if the affair comes to light!”
“As it must,” said Mrs. Marjoy, viciously; “and young Strong coming forward as our member, too! Nice sort of legislator to frame laws for the country’s good. Is it generally known yet?”
“My goodness! no,” quoth Mrs. Mince; “only Mrs. Primmer and ourselves are in the secret, so far as I can tell. The question is, what is to be done.”
The mind of this most moral trinity waxed meditative over the problem.
“I think Ophelia ought to be communicated with,” said the vicaress, after reasonable cogitation.
“Certainly,” observed the doctor’s wife, creaking to and fro in her chair.
“A matter of duty,” added Mrs. Mince.
“And charity,” said Miss Snodley, looking over the rims of her gold pince-nez.
They were all vastly serious over the business, exceedingly solemn, infinitely in earnest. The undercurrent of hypocrisy in their ethics did not seem to suggest itself to their minds. They were about to enjoy a triumph over a feminine autocrat, a woman disliked by reason of the superior comeliness of her person.
“Ophelia Strong must be warned,” said the vicaress, speaking as the most religious woman in Saltire.
“But by whom?” queried Miss Snodley.
Mrs. Marjoy’s aggressive voice claimed the responsibility.
“By us, of course,” she said.
For a moment they stared at one another in silence.
“How?” asked Miss Snodley, tentatively.
“By letter,” said the doctor’s wife.
“Anonymous, of course,” interposed Mrs. Mince, with hurried circumspection.
They debated the question briefly, and continued to satisfy the triple conscience as to the morality of the proceeding. Mrs. Marjoy possessed herself of her writing-case, and, after much tentative suggestion and voluminous wastage of paper, produced the following edifying document: